April 3, 2008

I had taken a group of action items at our last meeting relating to the Complete Streets projects for this year. After a quick meeting with Gary Costa and Rory Cameron from Public Works Engineering, I felt that enough of our issues were already being addressed that it didn’t make sense to do a formal letter from GAIT or solicit letters from our membership.

I’d welcome feedback about this decision. My rationale is that I want GAIT’s relationship with the city to be collaborative as much as possible. I’m sure there will be cases where we will need to be firm and disagree with some course that doesn’t serve ped/bike/bus needs, but I don’t think this is it.

Anyway, the CTC (Council Transportation Committee) agenda above still refers to the Village Park Drive project, but it’s my understanding that it’s on there so it can be removed from the list of bike lane striping projects.

I plan to attend the meeting this month (5pm April 10th in the Pickering Room at City Hall Northwest). If anyone else can make it that would be a great way for us to start showing the city the depth of support for ped/bike/bus issues in Issaquah.

2 Comments

1. Karen Behm

without knowing any details, my initial thoughts are to save the $ and skip putting bike lanes on village park
drive.

I guess I would support bike lanes there if they were planning on adding 2 more general purpose lanes, otherwise,
it is plenty wide and our ridable space would be narrowed by adding a 5′ bike lane. Isn’t the speed limit
25 mph? I probably should go up there – haven’t riden there in a couple years.

We need bike lanes on East Lake Sammamish! Newport Way east of SR 900! SR 900 all of it!

Right on, karen. I have to say that Jeff’s interaction with staff, as I observed tonight @ the CTC meeting, is comfortably low key & may have a good impact. My concern is that bike facilities went from ~$100,000 investment to $20,000 (out of $500,000 for Complete Streets) when they took out Montreux. Seems like there are other links they could stripe that would add more safety sooner than later.